Today we ask: Is it from God? Is it from the Devil?
Or is it from the bread we eat? The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this series
about the machines that make our civilization run,
and the people whose ingenuity created them.

In 1976 Linnda Caporael
offered the first evidence that the Salem witch
trials followed an outbreak of rye ergot. Ergot is
a fungus blight that forms hallucinogenic drugs in
bread. Its victims can appear bewitched when
they're actually stoned.

Ergot thrives in a cold winter followed by a wet
spring. The victims of ergot might suffer paranoia
and hallucinations, twitches and spasms,
cardiovascular trouble, and stillborn children.
Ergot also seriously weakens the immune system.

Now Mary Matossian tells a story about rye ergot
that reaches far beyond Salem. She studies seven
centuries of demographics, weather, literature, and
crop records from Europe and America.

Down through history, Matossian argues, drops in
population have followed diets heavy in rye bread
and weather that favors ergot. During the huge
depopulation in the early years of the Black Death,
right after 1347, conditions were ideal for ergot.

Many symptoms of ergot poisoning and the plague are
similar. They probably coexisted. The worst plague
damage occurred where ergot suppressed the human
immune system and made people vulnerable. Records
of plague deaths show huge regional variations. The
plague probably followed pockets of rye ergot.

And what about witch hunts? The symptoms of
bewitchment are consistent, but the way those
symptoms were received was not. Crazy behavior was
commonplace in the medieval plague years. The mad
"Dance of Death" is a
theme shot through medieval iconography. The spasms
suffered by ergot victims were called St. Vitus
Dance. Do you remember Ingmar Bergman's wonderful
movie about the plague, The Seventh
Seal? It began and ended with the figure of
death leading the doomed in an eerie dance across a
hilltop.

Then, in the 1500s and 1600s, the symptoms of ergot
were blamed on witches -- all over Europe, and
finally in Massachusetts. Witch hunts hardly
occurred where people didn't eat rye.

In the 1740s, the so called Age of Rationalism,
ergot symptoms became a mark of holy, not demonic,
possession. Visions, trances, and spasms were read
as religious ecstasy. It was a period of religious
revival that historians call the Great Awakening.

And we're left to wonder just how we cope with
diseases we don't understand, today. I read our
kinship with those old ergot sufferers in something
Kipling wrote:

I have eaten your bread and salt.
I have drunk your water and wine.
The deaths ye died I have watched beside
And the lives ye led -- were mine.

I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.

(Theme music)

Matossian M.K., Poisons of the Past. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

I'm grateful to Gene Chiappetta, UH College of
Education, for suggesting the Matossian source.